Capping a trifecta of promising global health and development stories this week, the number of women dying from complications of pregnancy and childbirth worldwide has fallen significantly since 1990, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
This week also saw announcements that global hunger had fallen and that malaria prevention and treatment efforts in Africa had saved hundreds of thousands of kids over the past 10 years.
On Wednesday, the WHO said annual maternal deaths had fallen by 34 percent since 1990, but that 1,000 women still die each day from complications, and mortality numbers are still above United Nations targets, Reuters reports.
Other figures in the report were far less promising than the overall mortality numbers.
Of the 358,000 maternal deaths in 2008, for instance, 99 percent were in developing countries.
According to the Associated Press, a woman in a developing country is 36 times more likely to die in childbirth or pregnancy than a woman in a developed country.
The rate of reduction in maternal mortality, meanwhile, is too slow to meet the official U.N. Millennium Development Goal of a 75 percent drop by 2015, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.
Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of WHO, said in a press release Wednesday:
The global reduction in maternal death rates is encouraging news. … Countries where women are facing a high risk of death during pregnancy or childbirth are taking measures that are proving effective. … No woman should die due to inadequate access to family planning and to pregnancy and delivery care.
Better training of midwives and improved family planning were credited with the decline in mortality. The health agency warned that more should be done.
"Every birth should be safe and every pregnancy wanted," said Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in the WHO statement.
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